Farm bill sets stage for more chaos

The decision by House Republicans to strip food stamp programs from the latest version of the farm bill for separate consideration later drew howls from the left.

But even though the scaled-back bill — passed July 11 on a 216-208 vote, largely along party lines — has been derided as a political stunt with absolutely no chance of becoming law, removing food stamps was the right thing to do.

In theory, at least, it allows nutrition programs and farm policy to be weighed on their own individual merits, not tied together for the sole purpose of promoting an exchange of favors between urban and rural delegations in an attempt to expedite passage, a practice that dates back to 1973.

But while this divide-and-reform approach makes sense, the farm bill itself is a whole other story.

This editorial page has long decried farm subsidies as a grotesque example of corporate welfare, particularly now that U.S. agriculture is enjoying record profits. The $196 billion legislation would only reduce 10-year projected subsidies by $12.8 billion, a fraction of the subsidy cuts proposed by both President Obama ($38 billion) and House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan ($31 billion). It also would lock taxpayers into a bloated crop insurance program that protects farms not just from natural disasters but also from market conditions, as well as costly and wasteful sugar and milk programs.

If House members were looking to reform farm policy, which is desperately needed, they failed miserably.

And by passing such a flawed farm bill, we fear they may have blown their best chance at overhauling the way our country feeds its needy, as well.

A flap over the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, after all, is why an earlier version of the farm bill — with the two issues still joined — sank in June. House Republicans called for $20 billion in cuts over the next decade; Democrats wanted to leave things the way they are.

Had House Republicans, in the wake of that defeat, crafted and passed a new farm bill with serious reforms — meaning an end to irrational farm subsidies that date back to the New Deal — they would be in a much better position to revamp the food stamp program.

Having scuttled wasteful farm subsidies, they could have then suggested equally sensible reforms to SNAP, even to the point of calling for the diversion of food stamp money into other programs that already exist to help the nation’s most vulnerable, such as Supplemental Security Income, unemployment insurance and the earned-income tax credit.

As Charles Lane wrote in The Washington Post, “If the working poor’s share of food stamps went instead to increase the earned-income tax credit and expand eligibility for it, Republicans and Democrats would have less to argue about.”